dumpster-diving for tasty bits about tech, culture, and law

Well, this pissed me off. Long-time readers of this site may recall my interest in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which aims to preserve the historical web. I’ve previously written to criticize the Bush administration for its lengthy robots.txt exclusion file (thousands of lines long), which could be viewed as an attempt to prevent the Wayback Machine and others from archiving portions of his White House website. I also wrote to compliment the new Obama White House website for its much shorter, and much more archive-friendly robots file.

But now the Obama administration is scrubbing the web, too. John Wonderlich at the Sunlight Foundation reports that materials from Obama’s old transition website at Change.gov have recently been deleted. Although the main page has referred users for a while to the Whitehouse.gov site, internal pages regarding his agenda were still online, and “until recently, you could still continue on to see the materials and agenda laid out by the administration.”

So why the change? Wonderlich speculates — and I think 100% correctly — that the internal Change.gov pages were removed due to broken and now inconvenient promises made in the transition team’s “Obama-Biden Plan” to protect whistleblowers. Considering the administration’s consistent actions in aggressively prosecuting whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and others, the administration likely decided to scrub inconvenient promises it made during the transition period.

But in an era of permanent digital records (hello, NSA and its yottabytes of storage in Utah!), how can the Obama administration be so naïve as to think that somebody wouldn’t: 1) notice the missing pages; 2) find the old site; and 3) point it out? As a prosecutor might say, destroying evidence may be proof of a guilty conscience. The administration’s naïveté is positively striking, considering that Obama’s people are widely touted as being extremely tech-savvy.

Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

The difference? No doubt it’s the Snowden affair, which broke in early June. A Google search of Change.gov for “whistleblowers” conducted today (screen cap here) shows no hits, so the page apparently has not been moved to another URL on the site. It simply seems to be gone.

Even more disturbingly, this may reflect a broader trend of digital scrubbing. Wonderlich notes that this is not the first time that Obama administration documents have disappeared from the internet. An earlier posting of his includes a letter the Sunlight Foundation and others sent to the Department of Labor criticizing the administration for removing materials. As the letter states, “No major administration decision should be accompanied by related materials disappearance from public view.”

“Back in 2007, Obama said he would not want to run an administration that was ‘Bush-Cheney lite.’ He doesn’t have to worry. With prisoners denied due process at Gitmo starving themselves, with the C.I.A. not always aware who it’s killing with drones, with an overzealous approach to leaks, and with the government’s secret domestic spy business swelling, there’s nothing lite about it.”

Today my tweeting was heavily focused on the revelation that Verizon gave up a significant amount of information to the NSA. Among the many interesting pieces I read was an attempt by Slate’s Will Saletan to justify the surveillance. In a nutshell, Saletan argues:

It isn’t wiretapping.

It’s judicially supervised.

It’s congressionally supervised.

It expires quickly unless it’s reauthorized.

Wiretaps would require further court orders.

See his article for further details. But in brief, his arguments seem to rest on the bases that the surveillance could be worse (true but not a justification), and that there are lots of nifty procedures to provide oversight (doubtful that they work). Below are the responses that I posted on Slate to Mr. Saletan’s arguments (slightly edited), providing my own translations for what I think the arguments really amount to:

“It isn’t wiretapping.” Translated: it could be worse, so suck it up. Not a real strong starting point.

“It’s judicially supervised.” Translated: the FISA court “supervises” the surveillance, which means that it probably usually rubber-stamps what the executive branch wants. But since it’s a secret court, we have no idea what’s going on.

“It’s congressionally supervised.” Translation: Congress also “supervises” the surveillance, which means it also likely rubber-stamps what the executive branch wants.

“It expires quickly unless it’s reauthorized.” Translation: the surveillance is likely reauthorized continually, making the authorization process a joke. And since we don’t know what’s going on, we’re not in on the joke. We are the joke.

“Wiretaps would require further court orders.” Translation: it’s “only” metadata, which ignores the fact that metadata—when aggregated with other user metadata and external sources of data—is extremely revealing of private information. The argument that “[w]iretaps would require further court orders” also goes full-circle back to point #1 that it could be worse, which again is not real persuasive.

Saying that something could be worse is hardly an argument. We don’t justify burglary by saying that arson is worse. And “oversight” is meaningless when it is a rubber-stamp that is unseen by the public. Indeed, meaningless procedures provide nothing more a veil of lawfulness to otherwise outrageous conduct. As Congressperson John Dingell once famously said about procedure, “I’ll let you write the substance … you let me write the procedure, and I’ll screw you every time.”